That One Summer

I’m crossing the street when Spotify betrays me.

I’ve been listening to a playlist they’ve made for me of songs I’ve listened to in summers past. Music has always served as an extra-sense kind of diary for me. I can picture the bar where I first heard the song Wagon Wheel, or feel the heat of summer night when I played Blackbird for my husband. This particular playlist has a lot of songs I was listening to prior to our wedding and it’s causing a lot of pleasant memories. 

The song that catches me off guard is one that I listened to a lot the summer before I met my husband. A few months before meeting him a friendship became something stickier than a friendship, and I played that song a lot while it was going on. When I met the husband I took the song off my playlists and eventually ghosted on the man. I miss the man involved from time to time but I never really looked back. Hearing this particular song on this particular summer day everything I felt that summer hits, and hits hard. 

The feelings are partially wistfulness for the friendship, but also desire for the person I was that summer. In the stickiness between friendship and sex and not-dating, I was constantly trying to be my most interesting, beautiful, desirable self.

It was amazing.

I was constantly reading and looking for odd bits of interesting news, so I was an excellent conversationalist. Sexual tension is a great incentive to buy new clothes and work out, so I always looked great. Dopamine is a terrific short-term replacement for serotonin, so I felt incredible.

It was terrible.

I was always trying to be witty and I stopped being fun. I was in shape, but worked out and monitored my food to the point of obsession. I was constantly high on the rushes I would get from the guy, but they were always followed by deep sadness when I realized he would never be able to give me what I needed. He left me breathless, in so many ways.

Hearing the song that stops me in the crosswalk leaves me breathless again.

***

Marriage is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Before the husband, all of my relationships were disposable things. They were opportunities to to try on parts of myself: The Has it All Together Career Woman, The Homemaker, The Wanna-Be Urban Farmer. My marriage is where I can have it mostly together, but I can also have a Saturday where I rewatch Archer and laugh like an idiot. I can whip up coq-au-vin after I set my cookbook on fire.

I can also be the complicated person that my mental health and extreme empathy make me. Usually that’s not a bad person, but we’re playing our marriage on an higher difficulty setting. My mental health issues combined with my husband’s autism mean that our capacity for misunderstanding and hurt feelings is nearly limitless.

But even with that limitless capacity, he’s the one sitting next to me laughing at television, putting out my small fires, and helping me learn to be the beautiful, desirable person that can still be herself.  

***

When I get home, it’s one of the few nights the husband has beat me back to the apartment. He’s cooking something that smells delicious, has fed the cats, and has a bottle of of cold champagne. His day hasn’t left him so overstimulated that he needs quiet in the house, so I turn on the speakers and start writing him a love letter in a language he won’t understand.

I play the song I’ve been listening to since our vacation in North Carolina, a week that felt like a honeymoon we never got to take. I play songs from our wedding and we dance a little in the living room. I play the song that I listen to when I’m mad at him.

I also play him the song from the summer before I met him, so he can know that part of me, too.

I’m sweaty from public transit and stopped wearing makeup after our first date. I’m still getting used to my different body and I don’t have a single interesting thing to tell him about the news or my work.

I accept a cold glass of champagne from him, happy in the knowledge that in this moment I am beautiful, desirable, and, finally, me.